Rusalka

CHAPTER 7

THERE WAS terrible pain. Somehow Pyetr had lost his way in the forest and fallen in with devils and leshys, most of whom had old friends’ faces and one of whom looked like a horse and another a black and white cat.

Finally he was in a dark hovel by a fireside, and a terrible old man was singing at him, not singing to him, but at him, and leaning forward to blow smoke into his face from a bone pipe.

He coughed. He stared in horror at this painted apparition, lit in fire, and in the way of all nightmares saw Sasha Misurov’s face hanging in the smoke, firelit and malevolent in its presence, while the song buzzed in his ears and the smoke stung his throat.

He coughed again. The singing stopped. “Keep him warm,” the old man said; and gathered up his pipe and his foul smoke and loomed up as a shadow against the cluttered rafters.

Sasha leaned forward, strangely distorted, strangely ominous, and he could scarcely move or breathe as Sasha dragged a quilt up to his chin and weighed him down under it. Whatever Sasha or the old man would have done there was nothing he could do to prevent it. “Lie still,” Sasha said in a voice that buzzed in his ears. “Lie still. Everything’s all right. It’s all over. You can sleep now.”

He could not remember what should be over. It sounded frightening. He saw the shadows move on the ceiling, like scampering cats in the rafters, strange shapes like creatures lurking and slithering and pausing again.

“I’ll be here,”Sasha said.

“Good,” he said thickly, finding speech difficult. He was not sure whether he could trust Sasha, or at least this dream of Sasha. It looked highly unreliable, and friends had played wicked games on him too often in his life—he did not remember when or why, but it seemed to him that one had attempted his life lately, and that this place was the result of it.

“The old man is a wizard,” Sasha whispered, tucking the blanket under his chin. “I know you don’t believe in wizards, but he truly is. He says you would have died if you hadn’t come here. He says you have to stay very quiet and not try to get up even if you feel better.”

He was not sure he felt better. His head was throbbing from the smoke or from the singing, and his side was bound so tightly it felt numb. But Sasha said, “I’m going to sleep right beside you. I won’t leave.” It seemed that that had been the condition for some time now, and that they had wandered a very long journey under those terms.

Daylight streamed into the clutter, light in which dust danced, and Sasha lay warm and dry, a condition which argued he should be in his own room in The Cockerel. Instead he was here, in this strange, object-crowded ferryman’s house, watching Uulamets fling the shutters open one after another, bang and rattle. Sasha’s nose had stopped running. His throat was only a little sore, despite the days of cold.

And Pyetr was by him, stirring a little, pulling his quilts over his head—which Sasha was glad to see. He had wakened from time to time through the night to assure himself that Pyetr was alive and well; he had seen the terrible sights all over again every time he had shut his eyes and fought his way back to sleep, and now that Pyetr seemed awake enough to defend himself from the daylight, more sleep was what he would only too gladly have had—pull the covers up between himself and the light and truly rest now.

But if it were aunt Ilenka opening up the shutters, she would take a broom to a boy lying abed, no matter how hard it was for that boy to move this morning, and he had no wish to start off badly with the old man; so he got up and ran his hands through his hair and made a respectful bow to Uulamets.

“Can I help, sir?”

“Take the bucket,” Uulamets said, “go down to the river. Fill the water-barrel. Mind you don’t get sand.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, pulled his bloodstained, dirty coat off the peg by the door, took the bucket and went out to do that.

It was several trips up and down the narrow track to the ferry landing, under the arch of dead trees—a clear sunny morning with bright edges to everything—a nip in the air, but a promise of warmth by noon: sunlight on the broad, tree-rimmed river that went—by everything Pyetr had sworn was true—down to great, golden-roofed Kiev.

Once their debt to Uulamets was satisfied, Sasha thought on his first trip downhill. Then Kiev. He tried not to think about the debt part of it, because he knew Pyetr would be angry with him when he knew he had bargained himself into an agreement with the old man—a very unlimited and vague kind of agreement, namely that he should help the old man, and the old man had not said how long this should be or what form this help should take-Yes, he had said, and spoken for Pyetr, too; and Pyetr was surely going to take exception to that.—Even if it was to pay for Pyetr’s life, Pyetr would insist there had been nothing wrong and Uulamets was a faker like the wizards in Vojvoda—

Pyetr might be angry enough to go off to Kiev and leave him; and that prospect, being left alone with the old man—

Sasha recollected smoke and fire and the terror the old man had put into him whenever he had flinched from the old man’s orders. He opened his eyes wider to the daylight and tried to drive that vision out of his eyes and the feeling out of his bones that there was something terribly dangerous and sinister about Uulamets beyond the obvious fact that he was a wizard.

The ferryman’s house he was sure had never been Uulamets’ proper post; no more than that boat, that very large, age-grayed boat which rode at its moorings in the river—had ever belonged to Uulamets … who therefore had taken this place. The god only knew what had become of the ferryman, or how long ago, or what the old man did here, in these woods so dead there was not even the sign of a rabbit—

Uulamets was at work in the root cellar when Sasha came back with the first bucket. He poured it in the barrel and went out again, not without looking to be sure Pyetr was still safely asleep and that nothing had happened, because he had a sudden, horrible imagination of Uulamets as a Forest-thing of particularly malevolent sort, who might for some reason known only to magical creatures be powerless so long as it was the both of them; but singly, and against a sleeping man—

It was a childish kind of fear. Duck the head under the covers and be safe from goblins. As if there was anything, he told himself, that Uulamets could not have done last night, when he had worked with knives—

He could not put it out of his mind, how Uulamets had started to pour the pain-draught on the floor, with that look of hateful satisfaction in the act—

No, not hateful. Malevolent. Hating. Wishing Pyetr to suffer

Sasha hastened his steps, filled the bucket and soaked his knee slogging uphill and up the sloping walk to the porch.

But there was nothing, when he opened the door, but old Uulamets poring over a book at the table, in the yellow light from the parchment windowpanes, and Pyetr still sleeping with the covers over his head, peaceful and unmolested.

He told himself he was a fool and trekked after the third bucketful, banishing thoughts of long-nailed demons and Forest-things. Uulamets was a wizard, absolutely: he had watched the color come back to Pyetr’s face last night, he had watched Uulamets hold his hands over the injury and seen Pyetr’s sweating, pain-twisted face settle slowly to ease.

No wizard in Vojvoda could do that… or there would be no people hurting who could afford the cure. Everyone in town would know it: people would flock to that wizard and make him richer than any boyar could dream—he would be the tsar’s own physician.

Uulamets could surely go down the river to Kiev and make his fortune with such skill-Could he not?

Then why did he sit in this hovel, beside a ferry crossing where no one came anymore, in a woods that had not a rabbit or a squirrel to populate it?

Bandits, he had called them.

But where were the bandits that everyone believed lived in this forest? And if they were off in some secret camp deep in the woods—how did they feed themselves with no travelers to rob and no game to hunt, except they lived as old Uulamets claimed he lived, by fishing and by gardening? That hardly seemed the life brigands would practice.

There was a lightness about the morning and a wrongness about the place which counseled Sasha«he might be in greater danger than the bright sun could warn him of, and he might well, if he were wise, wish himself back in Vojvoda, carrying buckets to his ponies that he very much missed this morning, or expecting the cat to walk the rail and wish him good morning—

—all the homely, ordinary things that just were not here, in this musty, dusty place on the edge of a river that saw no boats.

He had Pyetr, without whom he did not know what he would do. The thought of being alone with the old man appalled him for reasons he could not precisely lay a name to, and he was not so naive as Pyetr accused him of being: he knew which of uncle Fedya’s customers to avoid and how to give the slip to trouble.

But Uulamets, he thought, lugging the bucket the third time up the hill—but the way Uulamets looked at him with those eyes that did not let him look away, eyes that once fixing on him had made him fool enough to mumble yes when the old man asked would he pay the price he asked, not asking first what it was—

Because otherwise Pyetr would die and he would be alone here.

Pyetr could not leave without him, Pyetr could not be so cruel as that, Pyetr surely would owe him some gratitude—

—that because he was not wizard enough to heal him, he had made such a fool’s bargain with one who was.

By afternoon Uulamets had put him variously to scrubbing the log walk-up and the porch (more water to carry) and mending a loose plank and a broken shutter. By afternoon Pyetr was awake, sore and very weak, but avowing himself free of pain. He took a little tea, which Uulamets prescribed, and then got up, wrapped up in his ghastly rag of a shirt, and tottered outside for necessities, with Sasha’s help, scarcely steady enough to walk.

Pyetr had very little to say, except that the tea was good and that he felt better—and finally, before they reached the porch again, he said that they had best stay a couple of days before they were on their way again.

“We can’t,” Sasha said miserably. “—The ‘be on our way again,’ that is. The old man holds us to account for your doctoring.”

“Well, we’ll pay him.”

“We tried that,” Sasha said, realizing that Pyetr might have dropped many more things than that from his recollection of last night, and he stopped while they were still alone. “He’s a wizard. He says he doesn’t want money.”

Pyetr laughed, a weak, desperate sound. “All wizards want money, it’s what they do best.”

“Not this one.”

“The old man’s a good herb doctor. His stuff works. We pay him a couple in silver—I’ve got it—and we pay for our lodging and our board and maybe for a passage, if we can persuade the old goat to take that boat out—”

“He’s not the ferryman. I don’t think there’s been a ferryman here for ages. Not since the East shut down. And he won’t take money, Pyetr, he’s not interested.”

“Well, what does he want?”

It was not the question Sasha wanted at the moment nor the one he knew how to answer, and he shrugged. “I think he likes my cooking. I think maybe he just wants company for a few days—” That sounded entirely lame. “Maybe just some things cleaned and fixed. I told him I would. You need to rest, and I can scrub his floors and carry his water for him, that’s all he’s asked so far. That surely keeps us even for room and board.”

“That crazy old goat’s been working you all morning, I’ve been awake now and again.” Pyetr was white with the effort it cost him to stand, and he leaned trembling against the rail of the walk-up. “You’ve got yourself another uncle Fedya, he’s so anxious to do you favors and have his floors scrubbed. I’d watch this old fellow! I don’t trust him.”

There was real fear in Pyetr’s eyes. Sasha wondered how much of last night he did recall, or how much of the singing still ran through his brain.

“There are wizards,” Sasha said. “This old man is one, I don’t have any doubt about it, and it’s not safe to cheat him. There’s no telling what he could do.”

“Damned right there’s no telling what he could do! Drug our tea and carve us up for bacon is what he could do! Listen to me!” Pyetr seized his hand where it rested on the rail. “I don’t like his look. I don’t like dealing with crazy men and I don’t like eating and drinking with a crazy man brewing the tea and for all we know doctoring the soup. You’ve never been out on your own. You don’t imagine the kind of world this is and you don’t imagine what kind of things people will do to each other. For the god’s sake, boy… don’t trust this man and don’t consider yourself obligated to him for anything.”

“I promised him—”

“Listen, I’d patch a man up if he was bleeding on my floor, boy, and I’m not an honest man. What did it cost him? No more work than you’ve given. We’re even. That’s all. We’re quit.”

“He’s a wizard!” Sasha said. “Pyetr, you were dying, and he pulled you back—”

“Horsefeathers! I was tired, I was cold, I needed a bed and a meal—”

“You don’t remember! I watched him do it! Look at you. You’re sweating, you’re white as a ghost, you couldn’t have gone on another day.”

“You watched a good show, boy, it was already scabbed over, I wasn’t dying, I’m not dying this morning and I have no plans to be staying here any longer than takes me to get my wind back.”

He said that. He was hardly able to go on standing.

“Get out of the wind,” Sasha said. It sounded too much like an order, but he was not dealing with a sane man this morning. He tried to soften it. “Please, Pyetr Illitch. Please be patient, please just get well and do what he asks for a few days and don’t go off and leave me here…”

Pyetr was shivering now, his teeth chattering. The cold was getting too much for him, and the shirt was hardly more than a rag. “I won’t leave you here,” he said. “Damn if I will. Don’t promise the old goat anything. Don’t let him bully you. If he makes threats, tell me.”

“I promise,” Sasha said. He would have said anything to silence argument and get Pyetr inside and get another cup of hot tea into him.

There were things Pyetr would understand and there were things Pyetr would refuse to understand—or to believe in, until it was too late.

Maybe he was a fool, Sasha thought; and maybe Pyetr was entirely right; but if he had ever had a danger-feeling about a thing it was this place and this man.

Pyetr’s reasoning seemed sound to him, except in one thing—that it reckoned on simply walking away down the river shore; and he did not think Uulamets would allow that right now.

When he would allow it—or if he would allow it: that was the problem.

Uulamets put him to tidying up the cabinets and dusting before supper; and to cooking after mat, which was not so bad—one could filch a little while one worked, and Sasha did learn, in dusting off the lids of the smallest pots and rearranging things, where more of the spices were—and where other things were, some of which had clay seals, and some of which had scratches in those seals he thought might be magic signs; or perhaps—because aunt Uenka had had her marks, too, although she had no reading or writing—they might simply say what they were: things like mushrooms and moss and lichens, wormwood and what he thought was belladonna, and other things he had no idea at all.

Uulamets spent all the rest of his time reading and writing, by window light and by candle, except when he went out to the river and came back with a pair of good-sized fish, which he gave Sasha to clean; Pyetr offered his help at turnip peeling while Sasha cleaned the fish at the edge of the yard.

Of a sudden wings fluttered and cracked, and Sasha looked up in alarm as a raven settled to the ground and strutted solemnly over to pick at the offal.

It was the first bird, the first living creature he had seen in all this place except the fish they had for dinner, and by the way it looked at him, with a single black liquid eye—the other was put out—he was quite glad to feed it the offal, only so it let the fish alone.

“Be welcome,” Sasha said to the creature, and it dipped its head in the way of its kind, which might have been a bow, or only an inspection of its dinner. “I don’t suppose there’s a flock about? A rabbit or two? A deer?”

The raven looked coldly up at him with a fish liver in its beak, and after due consideration, bolted it whole.

“Quite,” Sasha said. “Too many questions. Excuse me, brother Raven.”

It gulped another mouthful and regarded him again with not quite disinterest.

One did not take such a creature for ordinary, not in this forest. He was glad enough to leave it the offal and take the fish up to the house, not without a backward glance.

But it was only a fish-loving raven.

“There’s a black bird down by the river,” he said to Uulamets, who was still at his studies.

“He comes and he goes,” Uulamets said, without looking up, so he took the fish to the boiling pot and threw it in, washed the fish-smell off his hands and took to the spice-bottles.

While Pyetr drowsed in the corner, or wisely pretended to, to evade quarrels.

The boy was a good cook, Pyetr decided, give or take the fact it was fish stew again. And he was not in a mood to complain. He had made up his mind to keep his head down and take Sasha’s very sensible advice, in fact, since he was weak as a day-old kitten, and since the old man and his stick1 were not inconsiderable.

But he kept score, and reckoned up the tab at this irregular inn, and assessed whether there was anything valuable to be had, beyond a clean shirt and maybe a coat or a blanket or two-reckoning that Uulamets would have worked at least that out of the boy in the time it took him to heal.

In particular he kept his eye on Uulamets and the old man’s access to the stewpot and the tea, this evening, in the case their kindly host decided to add to the recipe.

Uulamets sat all day long hunched over a book, following the lines with his finger—only rousing himself to give Sasha more orders.

Maybe that was all he ever did in this desolation—sit at that table all day and read that book, and set his fishing lines and cook and read that book again.

God knew what he was reading, or what could occupy him hours on end, just the occasional whisper of a turned page, about every candlemark or so.

Old man in a dead woods, reading his book till the words ate up his mind.

Except he enjoyed Sasha’s cooking.

“Good,” Uulamets said, tapping his spoon on the bowl. “More.”

And when Sasha had filled his bowl again:

“Set one outside,” the old man said.

Sasha bowed politely and went and did that—with the night and the dark out there which had once seemed halfway safe so long as they were in it; but which now, with light inside the cottage, seemed blacker than it had ever been. Pyetr watched that dark carefully, not able to figure just why the hairs were rising on his nape, but he was anxious until Sasha had (quite hastily) shut that door.

Foolish, Pyetr told himself. There was nothing different about the night than any other night.

But he spilled a little of his tea when a flurry of wings battered at the shutters.

Sasha spun around and looked at it, as if doubting the security of that window.

“What in the god’s name is that?” Pyetr muttered.

“Only a bird,” Uulamets said. “Just a bird.”

It was surely just exactly that, Pyetr thought; and thought that he would be just a little more confident of the honest, solid world if this damned old man had not said that: he was set to believe nothing Ilya Uulamets said, and Uulamets stole the truth and left him with this most foolish half-heartbeat of doubt what ground he was standing on.

Pigeon, perhaps. Perhaps the old man fed them and strangled them for his dinners.

“Tonight,” Uulamets said, gesturing at one and the other of them with his spoon, “tonight is the full moon. I have business tonight. Roots, you understand. Digging roots.” The white eyebrows lifted, and he took another spoonful of stew, smacking his lips. “I’d finish the pot. Wouldn’t waste this.” He set his bowl aside and rose. “Then I’d get to bed.—Would you care to come along, boy?”

“No, sir,” Sasha said; and Pyetr took a quick, measuring glance toward his sword, over against the wall with Uulamets’ staff.

Uulamets shrugged and took down his coat from the peg by the door.

Pyetr got up from the table, and walked over to pick up his sword and the old man’s staff.

The old man held out his hand. Pyetr thrust the staff into it.

“It’s boring work,” Uulamets said, “—digging herbs.” He lifted the latch. “Young people. They never like the working part. Just the results. My daughter was like that.”

This withered old man had had a daughter? Pyetr thought to himself. Incredible. Probably with the look and disposition of a shrike.

Uulamets went out into the dark and pulled the door to. The latch fell.

Pyetr let his breath go.

“We’re getting out of here,” he said. “Tonight.”

Sasha gave him a frightened look but he said nothing. Pyetr went over to the pegs by the door and took down the shirt that was hanging there and pulled it over his head. Sasha was still standing there as if he had no notion what to do or what to say.

“Get the quilts and some rope,” Pyetr said, and when Sasha hesitated: “Do I have to do it myself? Take down a string of turnips. The smoked fish there. It’s a long way to Kiev.”

“Pyetr, he’s not just any old man. And he helped us!”

Pyetr glared at him.

“—At least,” Sasha said faintly, “at least we don’t have to take a lot. One quilt. One string of turnips. We can get by.”

The boy’s disapproval stung, foolhardy as it was. Pyetr stalked over to the hearth and gathered up both quilts, cursed under his breath and threw one down, pulled down a coil of light rope from one rafter, while Sasha took down a string of withered turnips from the other.

“Can you walk that far?” Sasha said, jumping down off the bench, looking his direction with concern. “Pyetr, there’ll be other chances. Let’s not do this. We don’t know what the old man may do…”

“There’s nothing the matter with me. There never was. The old faker puts on a good show. He drugged me. You drank the tea. God knows what he put in it. He could make you see anything.” He took the turnips and rolled them up in the quilt on the table, doubled the ends toward the center. “Take a knife. We could always use a knife.”

“I won’t steal!”

“It’s not stealing. It’s fair pay for the work you’ve put in. Take the knife over there. And take the fish, while you’re at it. He gets them for free.”

“No,” Sasha said.

“Fool,” Pyetr muttered, and tied the quilt at either end, with the rope for a handle. He slung it over his shoulder, took his sword from beside the table and picked up the knife himself, and took his belt and Sasha’s coat from the peg. “Listen, boy, if you want to stay with him, you just do that. But if you have any sense—”

“I’m coming,” Sasha said breathlessly, and Pyetr tossed the coat at him, tied his belt, lifted the latch and opened the door.

Something doglike the other side growled and snapped at them.

“God!” he cried, as it lunged.

He slammed the door so fast it hit it with a thump, barking and snarling and spitting, shoving it inward as he shoved out. Sasha threw himself against the door and both of them pushed, while it scrabbled and snarled and hissed.

“What is that thing?” Pyetr yelled, fighting to get the bar thrown, while it jolted them and scrabbled at the wood. “What in hell is it?”

The bar went down. They leaned there panting, and heard the click of nails as it walked the porch.

It hit the window next, and scratched at the shutter. The shutter bar jumped and rattled under a sudden assault.

“My god,” Pyetr said. His knees were shaking. He tried not to make that evident. He stood away from the door, drew his sword and listened while the thing abandoned its attack on that window and padded, click, click, snuffle, whuffle, back along the porch.

It tried the door again, scratching like a dog at the corner and growling.

“It’s the Little Old Man,” Sasha whispered.

“Man, hell! It’s a damned black dog!”

“It isn’t a dog. It isn’t a dog, Pyetr, it knows we’re stealing—”

He heard the scratching, the click of claws. Perhaps it was only a trick of haste and bad light, the way it had looked, all black hair and teeth. He tried to make a dog’s shape out of his memory of those jaws, or to reconcile it with that spitting sound it made.

It did it again, and hit the door hard, so it rattled the bar.

Then more pacing. His hand sweated on the sword grip.

Something else moved, underneath the flooring.

“We should put things back,” Sasha whispered.

“It’s just a dog, for the god’s sake!”

“It’s not a dog—” Sasha unfastened his coat and hung it back on the peg by the door. He held out his hand. “Please.”

A man felt like a fool. If he were not recovering from a wound—if he were not still weak, he should fling the door open and behead the ill-tempered creature.

If there was only one.

It hissed at the door crack. And gave a cat’s ear-piercing shriek.

He winced.

“Pyetr!”

He shed the bedroll and Sasha moved quickly to untie it and to put everything back in its place, rope, turnips, quilt and all.

Another battering and scratching at the door.

“It hasn’t improved its disposition,” Pyetr said. “Dammit, boy, it doesn’t listen to your granny-tales.”

“Don’t make fun, Pyetr, please! It’s not to make fun of—”

“I swear to you I liked the Old Man at The Cockerel better. Pleasant cat. Scratch its ears and it behaves. This one—God!”

It hit the door with a force that brought him around on his guard, shaking in the knees. Its claws had to be ripping wood from the door-frame.

And something thumped under the boards beneath his feet.

He stood there with his breath coming hard and this terrible feeling that he was locked in a nightmare, that things had not made sense since they came to this house and that they might not make sense ever again.

He had no wish to be killed by a bogle in which he resolutely did not believe.

“How’s your luck tonight?” he asked Sasha. “Wish that one away. It’s rather well your line of work, isn’t it?”

“Put the sword up,” Sasha cried. “It doesn’t like it. Put it up. Please put it up.”

The boy was serious. So was the thing on the porch. And Pyetr had a most dreadful suspicion that tonight, this moment, nothing he knew for certain was certain at all.

“Put it up!” Sasha said.

He sheathed the sword. He walked back to the center of the room with a shrug, a swagger, and a misgiving glance at the door.

There was quiet outside.

He liked the conclusions that offered almost as little as he liked the slithering under the floor.

Sasha took the jug of vodka from the table and uncorked it, which Pyetr thought an excellent impulse.

But Sasha poured a little onto the floor, where it ran down between the cracks.

“Don’t make it drunk,” Pyetr said. “Haven’t we got enough trouble?”

Sasha glared at him. Sasha took all this appeasing of spirits with disturbing seriousness, and the stableboy was for a moment the one of them with no doubt what he was doing.

Pyetr lifted his hands. “I apologize,” he said. “I most earnestly beg its pardon.”

There was quiet then, just a little creaking of the boards.

He and Sasha looked at each other a long, quiet moment.

There was no sound but the wind.

“I’ll make tea,” Sasha said. “I think we can use some tea right now.”

Pyetr wanted the vodka. But he was ashamed to say that, so he sat down at the table, telling himself the wobble in his knees was only his recent injury and the tremor in his arms was surely natural after all the days they had gone cold and hungry.

He was glad to have the boy fussing about something as ordinary as making tea, which let him think about that instead of what might be on the other side of that door. The tea gave him, finally, something to do with his hands and something warm to hold.

“I think it’s settled down,” Sasha said, sitting down opposite him at the table.

“What ‘it’?” he retorted. “I don’t know what kind of livestock the old man keeps, but as cats go—”

Sasha looked at him from under his brows and bit his lip unhappily.

Like an accusation for a fool, Pyetr thought, denying the foolishness his eyes had seen, while he was shaking from having seen it—or not having seen it clearly enough or quickly enough to see it for what it was.

If things came out of granny-tales and attacked a man going out a door, then other things could be true, which he had no wish to think about.

He dropped his head against his hands and wished they had gone some other road but this.

There was the boat. He had no idea how to manage a boat, large or small, but he supposed that if one cut the ropes and set it loose even a big boat would drift; and the river had to be a safer route to Kiev than any shore with creatures like that roaming the woods. It might come to shipwreck…

He could not swim. Probably the boy could not.

So it was back to wandering the shore, and, he told himself, if they had made it here without accident, they could just as well go south with as great a confidence.

“We’ll try again,” he said; and Sasha whispered, anxiously:

“The old man’s a wizard, I tell you. He’s terribly dangerous.”

“Well, so are you,” he retorted. “Isn’t that what I heard all the way from Vojvoda?”

“Not like him.” Sasha raked a hand through his hair. “He can bring back the dead!”

“I wasn’t dead, dammit!”

“You were cold, Pyetr, cold as ice, your color was gone—”

“I was cold from walking three days with no food.” He reached after the vodka jug, poured a half a cup and sipped it. He did not want to think about that. Not tonight.

“It happened,” Sasha said. “Why can’t you see the truth?”

“Because it’s not sensible!” he said.

Which was all he could say at this point.

So he drank down the vodka and poured himself another cup.

Pyetr was angry at him, Sasha thought unhappily, while Pyetr drank his way to bed.

His relatives were like that. They said they placed no belief in his curse. But they still looked at him and frowned when things went wrong. Sometimes when she was angry, aunt Ilenka would say, Things happen with you around. I don’t know why I put up with you.

Pyetr did not believe in the Thing in the yard, even when it nearly bit him; and he did not believe in wizards, but he looked Sasha’s way with a certain frown that said to Sasha that he was certainly under consideration for fault in this—if Pyetr could find one.

And it might be his fault. There was always the chance that it was. In the face of someone as powerful as Uulamets, his I-will and his I-would were a whisper against a gale; but they were there: he knew that they were, with a conviction he had never had until this place—not a happy conclusion to reach.

But worst of all was the fear that Uulamets knew what he was.

That invitation tonight to join him—an invitation to him, but not to Pyetr…

Pyetr’s head sank onto his hand. He looked so thoroughly disheartened.

It was a long time before old Uulamets came back. Pyetr had taken to the quilts by the hearth, with his sword tucked in with him, with more than enough vodka in him to account fora sound sleep.

But Sasha waited, drowsing a little, listening for the old man’s step on the boards outside; and when at last it came, human footsteps and the tap of Uulamets’ staff, and finally the lifting of the latch, he was there to take the old man’s cloak.

“Still awake,” Uulamets said, a half-whisper as he set his staff against the wall. “I trust nothing disturbed you.”

One could not lie to a man like Uulamets. Sasha had made his mind up to that. He went and poured Uulamets a half-cup of vodka.

“My friend wanted to leave. Something objected.”

Uulamets took the cup and, with a frown, leaned against the table and sipped it. “I’m not surprised.”

“My friend and I—” Sasha made a bow. “We want to go to Kiev, master Uulamets. We want your leave to go.”

“After trying to rob the house—”

“Only a quilt and a string of turnips. Of nothing else.”

“—without a shred of conscience.”

“We understand we’re indebted to you, sir. We’re not thieves. Only we don’t understand what you want from us. We want you to tell us.”

“Huh.” Uulamets took a drink, wiped his scraggly white mustaches with the back of his hand. “Tell you.”

Sasha took a deep breath and ticked off the points on his fingers as he would to a merchant in the market. “We want a string of turnips, we want a quilt, and a string offish, and if you can sail the boat, we’d like very much for you to take us to Kiev, if you would, sir.”

Uulamets stared at him with those wolfs eyes and finally grinned, as pleasantly, Sasha thought, as the Thing in the yard.

“To Kiev.”

“Yes, sir, if you can. If not…”

“I won’t.”

“Then the quilt and the turnips and the fish. And a clean shirt and a proper coat for Pyetr. He’s a gentleman. He shouldn’t go ragged.”

“I’m sure. A gentleman with a certain difficulty: light fingers and lighter morals.”

“He’s not a thief. Neither of us is a thief, sir.” His voice began to tremble, and he was afraid it was going to get worse. “We’re willing to pay for what we take, but you won’t take money. I offered to work and I’ve done that. It seems as if we should be even. What else do you want?” His voice completely broke and worse, his chin trembled. “If you’ll make it clear what will square accounts we’re quite ready to do anything reasonable.”

Uulamets persisted in that slight wolf-grin. He drank another sip of the cup, set it down and stood up straight. “A bargain, is it?”

“For all the things I said, sir. And that you be fair with us and don’t play any tricks.”

“A wary young man.”

“And don’t arrange anything to happen to us.”

Uulamets turned his back and walked a few steps toward the hearth where Pyetr slept. He scratched the back of his head as if he was thinking, disarranging thin white hair, and slowly turned and looked back.

“A very clever young man,” Uulamets said, half-whispering. “Suppose that I did have a task for you.”

“What?” Sasha asked.

“I have a need for a clever lad. Tomorrow night, as it happens.”

“Doing what?”

“Digging roots.” Uulamets mouth quirked into a toothy smile. “And other things. For several nights, perhaps. Until I find what I’m looking for.”

He thought that perhaps he was being a fool. He wished he had dared ask Pyetr, but he knew what Pyetr would say to any such thing. He wished he knew whether it was his luck at work again that had made him think of bargaining with Uulamets.

Stronger, much—whatever luck or sorcery Uulamets had.

“That is what I want from you,” Uulamets said. “And when I have what I want you can take your turnips and your fish and two blankets. I’m in a mood to be generous.”